The Network Mananger 0.9 series has made some changes which break current Pidgin. After I installed network-manager 0.8.999 Pidgin won’t connect, stalling with “waiting for network connection”.
Turns out there is a workaround in Pidgin: you can force it to ignore what it thinks network availability by running it as:
$ pidgin -f
There’s no GUI way in gnome-shell to edit a launcher at the moment, fine; The old “edit menus” trick didn’t seem to work either. So to do that manually:
$ cp /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop .local/share/applications/
$ vi .local/share/applications/pidgin.desktop
And change the Exec line to:
Exec=pidgin -f
It won’t take effect until the desktop recaches things. Reload gnome-shell by typing “r” in the Alt+F2 run dialog and you’ll be on your way.
I’m sure upstream will catch up with the Network Manager changes in due course but I can live without network availability detection for now and this gets me back online.
I’ve been using Empathy for instant messaging for a long time, but I still love Pidgin for IRC. Go figure. So two clients it is.
AfC